Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most influential and well-known artists in modern American history. Her unique vision and her ability to expressly capture the environments and objects she paints are well-renowned, as well as her capacity to bring evocative feminist messages through in her works. Ever since her discovery in New York in 1916, she has existed as one of the most integral female artists in the world, providing a uniquely feminine voice to art long before women were able to successfully break in a major way into the art community. Her unique and vivid style is exemplified in the works Black Cross, New Mexico (1929) and Cow's Skull with Calico Roses (1931), which will be examined in detail and in context of their time period.
Georgia O'Keeffe and America in the 1920s and 1930s
America as a whole was changing during the 1920s and 30s as well. Due to the economic boon that World War I provided America in the late 1910s, people were used to a level of tremendous economic prosperity and wealth, only to see it end with the Great Depression in 1929. With that in mind, it was clear that the high-pressure and economically-fuelled lifestyles of the city were not working. These factors could have inspired O'Keeffe to make the move to examining the frontier of America, as represented by the skulls and dunes of the New Mexico desert. By getting as far away from civilization as was possible in that increasingly industrialized time, O'Keeffe sought to encapsulate what was unique about America and what it had strayed from.
Black Cross, New Mexico
In this oil on canvas painting, 39x30" in size, O'Keeffe paints a large black cross in the foreground - we are so close to it that it takes up the whole painting and it is implied there is much more to the cross outside its borders. Above the horizontal plank of the cross, which lays on the horizon, a clear blue sky with white highlights is seen. Below the horizontal plank, a sharp red and yellow line borders the plank, under which is a rolling sea of dunes, with large, acute humps rising up from the sand. This painting has a large sense of depth, with the dunes seemingly stretching back all the way to the horizon. With the cross in the foreground, it looms over the sand and almost completely obscures the background from the viewer's eye.
Both of these works embody a strange emphasis on beauty and death in the American Southwest. In Black Cross, the crucifix (a crucifix in the sand conjuring up images of the Crucifixion) is colored black, a color commonly associated with death. At the same time, the rolling dunes of the sand in the background provide an elegance and a beauty to the starkness of the rest of the painting. The painting itself was inspired by O'Keeffe seeing the sacred monuments of the moradas, remote chapels set up by Catholic brotherhoods known as Penitentes, strewn throughout the New Mexican landscape. According to O'Keeffe, she "saw the crosses so often - and often in unexpected placeslike a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape" (Skolnick and Campbell, p. 13). This was a way to show the domineering influence of Hispanic religion in New Mexico, by having the black cross dominate the view of the audience, almost to the exclusion of all else. With this simple painting, the religious and Catholic presence in the American Southwest is made surprisingly clear. It also showed the inexorable influence of man on the natural desert landscape, showing O'Keeffe's anxiety at the increasing industrialization of America, and the cost it would have on the serenity of New Mexico. With the cross' flat plane, staring straight out at the audience, the stretching perspective of the desert is also starkly contrasted.
With the black cross, almost oppressive in the foreground, O'Keeffe seeks to both protect and warn us about the dangers of the desert. The black cross is pushing us back, pushing us away from the rolling hills and unbearable heat, while at the same time telling us of the death that occurs there (through the blackness and unforgiving size of the cross). These things offer the viewer a feeling of both uncertainty and sheer beauty, as the American Southwest is presented as a romantic minefield of danger.
Cow's Skull with Calico Roses
In this painting, oil on canvas and 36x24" in size, O'Keeffe sets a cow skull on what looks like several pieces of parchment, with a black line bisecting them vertically. The skull rests on that line, facing the audience, with two white calico roses set on the skull - one is above where the left eye would be, and the other rose rests below its snout. The horns stretch out on either side toward the borders of the painting, and ripples down the right side of the parchment paper indicate there are several layers of paper on which the skull is laying.
O'Keeffe's fascination with death and flowers is continued in Cow's Skull, where the skull of the cow, surrounded by objects either matching or directly contrasting the skull's off-white color, shows just how omnipresent death is as a factor in everything. Sneaking in the calico roses to surround the skull, one gets the impression that they will die too. This painting in particular is a turning point for O'Keeffe, as she incorporated images of death and entropy along with her popular, famous roses.
The influence of religion on the American Southwest is also present in this painting, as the positioning of the skull, with the two horns stretching out on either side, closely resembles a crucifix. Much like Black Cross had the titular cross in the desert to symbolize death through the Biblical Crucifixion, this cross being formed by a skull also conjures up that identification with both religion and death. The ovular opening in the cow's skull where the snout would be can be thought to resemble labia, much as in many of O'Keeffe's paintings of flowers - it is one of the most common and prevalent readings of O'Keeffe's work (Solso, p. 140). This also creates a unique link between sex and death - the vaginal image here (surrounded by flowers to create visual and thematic continuity between O'Keeffe's works) is embodied in something that symbolizes death and entropy.
O'Keeffe was inspired to paint skulls due to the sheer number of them she found out in the New Mexico desert. In 1930, a drought in the South west caused many animals to starve to death, littering the dunes with their skeletons. She said once that the skulls of these animals "are as beautiful as anything I knowthe bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable" (Robinson, 1990). The flowers themselves are resembling of the artificial flowers that people put on graves in New Mexican cemeteries - this further links the image to American Southwestern culture. This painting, in and of itself, seeks to encapsulate the attitudes and the atmosphere of New Mexico as O'Keeffe saw it.
The whiteness of all of the objects in the picture (the skull, the flowers, the parchment) indicate the bleaching of the sun that happens to many objects when they are left out in the New Mexican sun. All of these things being similarly colored, a unique sense of symmetry occurs, and one notices the life and death in both the skull and the flowers. By having the painting drained nearly entirely of color, the painting seems desolate, dead and decrepit, even the flowers being artificial and unliving. The starkness of the color choice mirrors the blackness of the cross in Black Cross, as these severe, lifeless colors are intimately associated with the church and civilization. This demonstrates the heavy influence that humanity was having on the environment, and conversely the death that often came to living beings who attempted to brave the desert.
O'Keeffe attempted to find the beauty in death and entropy by having the sun and the sands wipe away all signs of life or civilization in her paintings, as evidenced through both the sole cross in the same and the completely-cleaned-of-skin skull. By removing the influence of animals and humans on the landscape, the American Southwest achieved a clarity and a cleanliness that was not seen in New York or the big cities. These paintings are indicative of her fascination with the sense of uniqueness and adventure that the American Southwest offered; this was the one place in America that was still truly dangerous and life-threatening. By attempting to tame it - either through religion or industrialization - one would court death, which she conveys through the cross and the skull. The Catholic influence in such a hazardous and stark environment gives us the symmetry present in both Black Cross and Cow's Skull, as evidence of life (the sky, flowers) is undercut and bisected by these symbols of rigidity, of formula, of death.
Works Cited
O'Keeffe, Georgia. Black Cross, New Mexico. Oil on canvas. 1929.
O'Keeffe, Georgia. Cow's Skull with Calico Roses. Oil on canvas. 1931.
Potter, Polyxeni. "Georgia O'Keeffee (1887-1986). Cow's Skull with Calico Roses (1932)."
Emerging Infectious Diseases vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 558-559. Print.
Robinson, Roxana, 1990. Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, Bloomsbury, London.
Skolnick, Arnold, and Suzan Campbell. Paintings of the Southwest. UNM Press, 2002. Print.
Solso, Robert L. Cognition and the Visual Arts. MIT Press, 1996. Print.
Wong, Patty. "Implementation of Johansen's Art Criticism Model Within a Grade Two
Classroom." University of British Columbia, 1979. Thesis.
